On a different subject….

Our “About” page promises yiddishkeit, and I feel obliged—though only what the President-elect would call a “mutt”—to deliver every now and then. Today I’ll just borrow from Spencer Ackerman:

Nearly four out of five Jewish voters went for Barack Obama. As Gershom Gorenberg notes, spamming your zayde to say that the schvartze is really a Muslim didn’t work. All that vile shit about how electing Obama paves the way for a “second Holocaust” didn’t work. Right?

I suppose that’s one interpretation. But here’s another: I cast my vote for Obama, but what I was really voting for was another was another Terezin ghetto. I’m probably one of the few who sows a yellow Star of David onto all of his clothes anyway, but now my fashion choices can be my fellow tribesmen’s. My next tattoo? You guessed it. There’s nothing we Jews love better than Holocausts. With any luck, we’ll make them a near-annual event like Wrestlemanias. You say we can’t, but I say: Yes We Can.

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For the past two election cycles, we have seen in both the mainstream press (what used to be called the daily press, or the English press, or the bourgeois press, depending) and in Jewish newspapers, articles about how Jews were moving rightward, how we were abandoning the Democratic Party, how the Likudniks were finally being successful in getting American Jews to vote for Republicans, how we were finally voting our pocketbooks.

And then, in the few months after each election, there have been articles (mostly in the Jewish press) about how Jews have voted Democratic at record levels.

I would really like reporters to stop being suckered by the Likudnik hawks, by the Republican Jewish Committee, and by Jewish conservative pundits. Jews were never anti-Obama, they were never the racist yokels depicted by Sarah Silverman, never the single-issue-Israel-above-all-else voters that Republicans and other antisemites imagined.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Maybe by 2012 the story will disappear.

Sorry, jacob: it’s far more likely a prospect that for 2012 the Jewish Democrat/Republican, rightwing/leftwing debate will simply return for yet another iteration. And it goes back further than “two election cycles”: it became a significant factor in domestic politics after 1967: President Nixon (antisemitic bastard though he was) was the first to really exploit (or try to exploit) “concerns” over Israel to GOP advantage.

For good or bad – under the “three Jews, four opinions” rule – those “..Likudnik hawks, the Republican Jewish Committee, and Jewish conservative pundits” are always going to be with us. At least for the next three years or so, they’ll be doing their hysterical fulminating from outside the corridors of power.

I thought during the election that we should have taken the opportunity to take a more balanced approach to holocausts, instead of just rejecting them out of hand in a mindless, knee-jerk way. WWII was traumatic, but it’s more than sixty years in the past by now. Amity Schlaes has revolutionized our understanding of the Great Depression, and it’s also time for someone to come up with a more balanced view of holocausts.

Furthermore, if anyone knows Seymour Hersh, I think that he should hire Ackerman or some other hot internet journalist. From what Hersh said recently, the floodgates will open on Jan. 20 and he’ll have more reporting to do than he can physically handle.

And finally, the blogosphere should raise money to buy Sasha and Malia a pony. They don’t cost much and kids love them. A pony would also also put the Obama cuteness index into the stratosphere, simultaneously enabling outreach to the crucial 4H vote while bypassing the controversial sex issues. And ponies are not snooty and elitist the way dressage thoroughbreds are.

When Republicans put out the Republican Jew meme, they’re mostly being wishful, but not only that, they’re just trying to shave off ten points or so. If Jews went 65-35 Democratic, that would be an enormous Republican victory. And it doesn’t cost them much to try.

As for the journalists, they’re fucked about everything, not just the Jewish vote.

Yiddish trivia: Floyd B Olson, the radical Minnesota governor 1930-1936, grew up in a Jewish neighborhood and spoke Yiddish. Some say he was fluent, but certainly he was able to chat. He always kept in touch with the Minnesota Jewish community, including the Jewish gangsters and Communists.